Flyp adds multiple phone numbers to your smartphone

Flyp is a new iOS/Android app that lets your smartphone have up to 6 different phone numbers that are active at the same time. The first number is free, and for each additional “value added” phone number (up to 5 can be added), you will be charged a monthly fee of $2.99 ​​(or an annual fee of $29.99). The Flyp app manages all numbers, voicemails, text messages, and notifications. Flyp first appeared at the South West South Conference in 2015, which was launched on Tuesday at the iOS and Google Play app stores.

I interviewed Peter Rinfret, co-founder of the company, who told me that Flyp's goal is to cater to people's increasingly multifaceted lives, to have multiple ways to connect, and to choose how to control the flow. Your own conversation.

For example, you can give different numbers to work contacts, family contacts, and school contacts. You can then set up filters for who can call yourself when (for example, you can adjust your work number to do not disturb, but keep the family number available).

It's also worth noting that Flyp's intentions and messages to be conveyed are different from other one-time number applications (such as Burner or Hushed ), whose use cases tend to be somewhat ambiguous. Instead, the number provided by Flyp is permanent, or at least as long as you pay the bill monthly. I think people can use these numbers as they please, but Flyp promotes this concept as a very "open" management tool, not a strange one-time phone number system.

This is very interesting to me because I have been using Google Voice for a long time as an agent to contact me. It has been a very useful tool for managing a large number of incoming calls, and I can see that Flyp is meeting a similar need.

According to conversations with Flyp, their goal is to get their system tools to meet or exceed their competitors. They have QuickReply text messages, which are similar to Android's Quick Responses feature. However, the company was unable to use voicemail transcription as a selling point, but it has been placed on their product roadmap and will be available in later versions.

How to set it up? As far as I can, I can use it. I noticed that there are some restrictions on the free number that users get. You can't customize the voicemail information, and you can't customize the quick reply SMS. However, adding a second (or third, fourth, fifth) phone number to yourself seems to be an affordable option for each number that only requires a monthly fee of $2.99.